Final countdown for NASA's NuSTAR X-ray black hole telescope NASA has confirmed that it is good to go with the delayed launch of the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) on June 13, and expects to begin spying out the supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies within a month. The $170m telescope will create the first accurate census of the "local" black hole population …
Yes, Italy has a space agency...
From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Marco_programme
"The project resulted in the launch of the first Italian-built satellite, San Marco 1, on December 15, 1964. With this launch Italy became one of the first countries in the world to operate its own satellite, after the Soviet Union and the United States"
If you think about what a black hole really is, you'll realize that your description is actually as ridiculous as his. We don't really have words to describe what happens once you pass the event horizon. It is only accurately describable with equations. And we aren't quite sure what they mean on "the other side" of the event horizon where space has negative curvature, assuming of course the equations are continuous and not bounded at the event horizon.
I will grant that the author did not use the usual words seen in literature describing black holes.
I have to wonder what that term means in the context of this experiment because, as others have pointed out above, there seem to be rather a lot of factual or misleading inaccuracies in what she said.
In order of appearance in the article:
"At the center of each black hole is the event horizon..." Umm... at the [debatable] center of a Black Hole (BH) is the singularity. The Event Horizon (EH) isn't, as far as we know, any sort of entity in its own right but is just the distance from the singularity where a number of interesting things happen.
"Einstein predicted that the effects of the event horizon would bend light..." Einstein did not predict that the EH would bend light. He predicted that the presence of matter would bend space-time and that light would appear to bend as it followed a straight path through this bent space-time. The EH, not being something that actually exists in its own right, does not have or cause 'effects'. Rather, the EH is itself an 'effect'.
"NuSTAR is also looking to investigate supernovae, particularly the most recent ones that still retain evidence of what caused the Big Bang" WTF??? This must be a contender for oxymoron of the year. Type 1b, 1c & 2 supernovae require relatively large stars and, because of their size, could not have existed long enough to be relevant to the Big Bang (BB). Type 1a supernovae are believed to involve white dwarf stars and these could conceivably be old enough to be relevant to the BB except that even the very first stars are not thought to have formed until ~400 million years after the BB, well after all the really interesting origin related stuff had been and gone.
"NuSTAR is also looking to investigate supernovae, particularly the most recent ones that still retain evidence of what caused the Big Bang"
When I read that, I assumed that I had missed something where it was hypothesized that supernovae may re-create some aspects of the BB. Tho, the EH at the center of the Black hole bit made me re-consider.
Then again, maybe she's just a horrible speaker, and an awesome researcher.
Early cosmology relies upon 'old' radiation which, by definition means it has come from a very long way away and radiation that has come from a very long way away will have been red-shifted due to the expansion of the universe. The problem here is that the planck length and time units would appear to set limits on the shortest possible wavelength/highest possible frequency of radiation, so it would seem that X-ray detectors are limited to seeing stuff from within a limited distance, and therefore age.
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